In the first post of this series, we introduced the practice of Master Data Management. Master Data Management, or MDM, is a way to effectively organize data at your organization. MDM brings together disparate systems and presents you with a unified view of your constituents. MDM can make your operations more efficient, lowering your bottom line and elevating both fundraising and engagement, as well as enhancing programmatic outcomes. We suggested that Master Data Management is critical for most nonprofits today because constituent data is no longer stored in only one database. To understand your constituents and communicate with them effectively, the data managed your multiple and distinct applications must come together in a meaningful way.

In the following three posts, we discussed the three core processes of Master Data Management:

• Reducing bad data through prevention, correction or auditing.
• Deduplication by identifying and merging matching records by normalizing, matching and mastering.
• Verifying data through automation, user review, and external augmentation.

In this, the last post of this series, we will briefly outline the basic five-stage Master Data Management implementation strategy for nonprofits: Plan, Design, Build, Deploy, and Support and Monitor.

Plan

Defining and documenting your MDM strategy is the first step in your implementation effort. A comprehensive strategy brings together organizational goals and objectives, policies and guidelines, relevant standards and business processes, identified governance bodies, and tools and technology. Once your MDM strategy has been established, you will assess the system architecture and evaluate how well each element supports the implementation of MDM. When complete, the combination of your MDM strategy and system architecture will be the primary input for the work ahead.

Design

During the design phase, you will develop the exact rules that will support your MDM strategy. These rules will be applied and enforced in your system architecture through business processes and technologies. If you have not already, you should review and select key tools.

Your work in design should standardize MDM rules throughout your architecture, ensuring that the same requirements are being met no matter which system the data originates from, or where it migrates to. This will likely begin a conversation about error tolerance: you must balance the effect of bad data present at any given against the staff effort it takes to prevent, audit, or correct it.

During the design phase, you should establish the level of applicability of each rule. This is the point at which the outcomes of your early conversation about error tolerance will become critical. Your decisions about when bad data is worth staff effort will serve as a guiding principle as you build out your MDM implementation.

The design phase should result in a clear and specific plan to move from the current state to the state proposed in design: the deployment plan. Your deployment plan should include the methods to clean up existing data, the steps to implement the MDM business processes and rules, and the dependencies that will determine which rules must be activated during deployment, and when.

Build

Your build phase will move the rules created in Design into your chosen tools. You will implement specific business processes, tools and technology that will direct user behavior and enforce those rules. You will create prevention methods (such as validation rules), correction methods (such as workflows) and test methods (such as audit reports).

It’s imperative to thoroughly test all of the new MDM measures during Build. Tests should include accuracy testing (making sure each new measure is producing expected results), volume testing (making sure that the same results are achieved with a large number of records), and business process testing (making sure that processes are streamlined and efficient for staff). It’s particularly important to test the staff time spent on MDM processes. Often an organization’s tolerance for data errors will change when they get a realistic understanding of the level of effort spent by staff on correcting those errors.

Deploy

Once the MDM rules and business processes have been established and the deployment plan has been created and updated with any changes from Build, you are ready to deploy MDM. Deploying includes finishing any cleanup needed for the existing data, training staff and volunteers, distributing documentation, and activating MDM rules so that the MDM system is “live.”

Deploying Master Data Management will likely include the first meeting of a governance or oversight group. This group will regularly discuss their experience with the MDM strategy once live, and discern organizational needs going forward. To deploy is to document, analyze and adjust. As with any large transformation, MDM deployment reveals the places that require a fair amount of tinkering. Recognize that this time of transition, overseen by people empowered to review and invested in the outcome, will better realize your goals long term, by reviewing the balance of error tolerance, refining  prevention and correction procedures. and responding to feedback from staff responsible for auditing.

Support & Monitor

After your MDM strategy goes live and you begin the support and monitor phase, ongoing governance should be established. As we mentioned, governing MDM may require a fair amount of monitoring and adjusting, particularly in the first 6 months, to realize the appropriate balance of effort vs. results.  The purpose of ongoing governance is to keep the MDM strategy alive and useful by creating knowledge-keepers of strategy and documentation. These essential people continually monitor the effectiveness of current processes and proactively examine the effects of organizational changes on MDM.  If your organization created a governance committee to oversee the project, that committee will be ideally positioned to transition into the role of ongoing MDM governance.

Summary & Conclusions

We hope that this short series describing Master Data Management as an operational strategy, introducing the core processes, and outlining the basic implementation phases, has given you a sense of the power and promise of Master Data Management. As we noted in the Introduction: While nothing can replace a great mission, effective organization strategy, dedicated staff and the right tools and technology, by bringing all of this together your nonprofit can fully achieve its goals.

For more information on how Master Data Management can benefit your organization, please contact us.